The Culmination of a Lifetime
by Van Donovan
Summary: Eight months after the Battle of Hogwarts, a package arrives for Harry.


**Title:** The Cumination of a Lifetime  
><strong>Pairing:<strong> Snape/Harry if you squint really hard, canon levels of Snape/Lily  
><strong>Word count:<strong> 1,576  
><strong>Era:<strong> Post-Deathly Hallows  
><strong>Warnings:<strong> none beyond spoilers through book seven.  
><strong>Summary:<strong> Eight months after the Battle of Hogwarts, a package arrives for Harry.  
><strong>Notes: <strong>This isn't a fandom I ever write in, but I did this as a Christmas present for a friend. I thought some other people might also enjoy it. :)

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><p>It took nearly eight months for the Ministry to sort through Snape's personal belongings; he had lived in the dungeons for years and created his own peculiar method of organization. With the wizarding world still reeling from the second war, progress was additionally slow, and even beyond that, after Snape's death everything he had ever done or owned or worked had become suspect. Things were scrutinized and studied, cataloged and filed. Then they were taken out and examined all over again. It took months for the whole process to complete, and only then did the reformed ministry begin reaching out, contacting those Snape had asked be notified in the event of his death.<p>

It wasn't like it had been with Dumbledore.

No ministry official arrived with a dry letter and a collection of heirlooms to pass out. Just one day there was a flurry of owl wings and a package wrapped in plain brown paper appeared outside Harry's tent in its wake.

Only four months after the battle at Hogwarts, Harry had retreated from the public eye, needing desperately still to lick his wounds in private. His friends knew where he was, for the most part. Sometimes Ron or Hermione sent an owl to check up on him, but overall, they worried in private, respected his wishes and left him alone.

The package was addressed to him, from Severus Snape care of the Ministry of Magic. For three days it sat outside the tent while Harry fished in the ice-cold Icelandic stream that ran outside his tent, or tirelessly honed his shoulder muscles chopping logs into planks to burn in his campfire.

There was no magic here, only manual labor, hard work and sweat. There was no intrusion from the wizarding world, no reminder of the havoc and devestation he'd helped bring about. The little package sitting outside the flap to his tent shattered that illusion.

On the third day the sky opened up and a deludge of water poured forth, swelling the stream and muddying the banks. Helpless at the onslaught, Harry retreated into his small tent and took the paper-wrapped package inside with him to shield it from the elements.

There was no long table in his muggle tent; no rooms that magically branched off. There was a sleeping bag against one side, and enough space on the other for his backpack, a cooker, a muggle radio, and a few other supplies.

For a long while Harry sat in his tent while the rain poured down around him, hugging his knees and staring at that little brown package. Its presence brought the world he had been avoiding far too sharply back into focus; made the deaths and losses he'd felt eight months ago ache all over again. It forced him to reexamine his role in those events; to once again reassess what he could have done differently. How he could have changed things so he didn't have to attend Fred's funeral, or fill eighteen scrolls with testimony of the battle he'd helped lead. How he could have done things differently to prevent this package from arriving for him from a man he had believed the last eight years had hated him.

As the sun sank below the cloud bank outside his rainy tent and eventually below the horizon, darkening the already dim interior, Harry finally fumbled for his torch. It cast stark shadows against the rain-slicked walls of his tent, unsettling enough to goad him into pulling out his kerosene lamp and illuminating the tent with firelight. The shadows the lamp cast flickered and danced, but somehow they felt warmer and less threatening than the garish white-light from the torch.

Without thinking about it, Harry pulled the brown package to him, untied the twine string around it that had served as purchase for an owl's claws, and pulled a small wooden crate free from the brown packing. The metal staples holding the lid shut came loose with only a minimal effort of prying.

Inside, he found a stack of neatly bound letters, yellowed with age, a somewhat faded Gryffindor tie, a jar of tumbled yellow stones, a hand-held mirror wrapped in soft black velvet, three tarnished silver rings, an unlabeled empty bottle that still smelled of scotch, a half-dozen mother-of-pearl buttons, a bundle of brittle lavender, a leather-bound journal full of flowing script that Harry knew wasn't Snape's, two pocket-sized books of poems, a cracked pair of round spectacles, a flat skipping stone, an empty jar of pepper imps, two long white bird feathers, and a very small plastic toy lion.

He knew, without needing confirmation, that the things were his mother's. At least had some relationship to her. Instead of delight, that knowledge settled like iron in the pit of his stomach. They hadn't come to him because Snape wanted to return them. They came because they legally belonged to him as next-of-kin now that their owner—thief?—was gone.

The joy of having some artifacts of his mother's warred at the acute sense of loss he felt at receiving them because of Snape's death. These were Snape's things, not his. And, almost worst, there was nothing from Snape for him. No amulet or talisman with words of wisdom engraved on it to help him through this dark time. No letter to offer condolence or understanding. Not a single word from the man that should have been his mentor and not his antagonist.

Cold and numb with feeling, Harry gently pushed the little wooden crate away. The letters, he imagined, were from his mother to Snape, written in a time before their friendship deteriorated. The little journal he suspected was also hers, perhaps stolen from her by Snape one lazy day, in hopes of finding a glimpse of fond words written inside about him.

Perhaps someday Harry would read them, but it wasn't going to be tonight.

He was about to put out the lamp and make an early night of it when something compelled him to return to the box. He neatly pulled out each item this time, laying them flat on the foot of his sleeping bag instead of rifling through them in the crate. The buttons threatened to roll away so he put them in the pepper imp jar, along with the ends of the feathers.

At the very bottom of the crate, beneath a crumpled bit of padded packing, he found an ivory colored letter, sealed with wax.

The front, in the now-familiar scrawl of the Half-Blood Prince, were the words "For H. Potter."

Heart lively thudding in his chest now in a way that it hadn't for months, Harry slipped his forefinger under the back flap and gently tore the top of the letter open.

Inside was a one-page letter, neither signed nor dated, but undeniably written by Snape.

_Now that I am deceased, may these items of your mother's return to you. I would consider it a kindness if you did not read the letters. I am afraid she would not be pleased with my behavior toward you these past few years. I regret that. I had once thought, after the Dark Lord's final defeat, I might have had the chance to make up for that; perhaps know you better as a man than as the shadow of your father with _her_ eyes that I convinced myself you were. It is too late for that now. Don't live your life as I have, full of regrets. Not even the most powerful wizard can change the past._

_I hope you will never receive this letter; that I feed it to the fire in ten days time, when I suspect this will all be over. Perhaps then I can attempt to make these amends in __person. I cannot blindly trust in the hope I will survival all of this anymore and so must commit these thoughts to print. Words are shallow and meaningless, quill to paper like this, but I have regrets. I have this box—the culmination of a lifetime of regrets—and nothing else. If there is anything left I can do in this world it is to take after your mother; to die so that you may live. At least in that I will have no regrets._

Harry's breath came slow and shallow as he read through the letter three more times, his throat catching each time on several passages. He ran his thumb over the smooth, black ink, aching to touch and reassure that lonely mind.

Around him, the cold, damp forest closed in, its silence suddenly loud and oppressive. For the first time he he didn't feel free, hiding in solitude, but alone. Lonely. He had friends—a family—waiting and worrying for him. People—so many people—had sacrificed and died to bring him peace at long last, and here he was ungrateful, squandering it by hiding; miserable and alone in a dark forest in another country.

Somehow it took the letter of a dead man he'd once perceived as an enemy to realize all he had and was wasting. As he began to hurriedly pack his things into his traveling pack, he ached for the ability to thank Snape, after all this time.

He knew, as the rain fell upon him while he broke down his tent, that the only way to do that now was by taking the advice in the letter. He wasn't going to just return to his friends; he was going to _live_.


End file.
